Keep your video feed disabled. If you enable it, and able it a second time, we will have to remove it. Appreciate your cooperation. I want to briefly go over our format. We will have a reading by miles harvey to start us off. After miles harvey reads from the king of confidence which was published this past tuesday and donovan hohn reads from the inner post which was published last month in june we will hear an extended conversation between the two for 30 or 45 minutes and a few slides here and there and add some supplemental images. Once we are done questions for miles or donovan send them my way and i will field and screen those. Now i will quickly read some bios and we will get the reading underway. Miles harvey is author of the International Bestseller the land of lost maps. His book stranger in a savage latin was named book of the year. Currently teaches at the university. Interlocutor miles harvey is author of moby duck, the true story of basketball players, New York Times notable book, john Kenneth Gilbert award for nonfiction and the wilson literary science writing award. The second book was published by w morton early next month. Both these men graduated from the nsa Program University of michigan a few blocks away from the bookstore. Otherwise i would appreciate it. If you wouldnt mind putting your virtual zoom reactions together, thank you. Good to see you. Un msa program, poetry, probably why your book is longer than mine and we both teach nonfiction in chicago and detroit. It is really nice, guy wants to be clear that this is miles harveys event, he is sharing the stage with me. I will get ahead of you with your reading, the antihero of the book who you will tell us about tonight is getting crowned king and you write somehow the king managed to convince the 235 lonely souls gathered in the tabernacle that his paper crown was a royal diadem, homes with occult energies with red robe stitched together by ladies of the church, and developed him in righteousness and splendor. In tonights event, we dont have to hundred 35 lonely souls gathered in this tabernacle but you are the king, george adams, the theatrical impresario so why dont you start as i said to you before with nonfiction books we end up being quoted experts on the subject but i really love your pros so i want you to read some. You will go with something that will help us understand the title the king of confidence. I love your pros but we will get to that in a minute. If you could put upside one. I will introduce our audience to the title character of my book. All right. There he is. I will read a little bit about this man james strang and his time. Go which the antebellum era, the decades leading up to the civil war. This is the guy and you wonder how he manages a, you can leave it up, leave side one up, they are you go. So if he doesnt look like the most charismatic guy to you, listen to this was all those James Jesse Strang was not imposing, a few inches over 5 feet and bald with an oddly bulging for head he did poses one distinguishing feature, his dark brown eyes which one acquaintance described as a rather small but bright and piercing given an extremely animated expression to his whole countenance. Another claimed those eyes seemed as though they could bore right through a person. More than any tangible attribute, straying possessed an ineffable confidence. In those days before electrical power confidence was what made the and her beer him and alone era, confidence was black magic, good fortune and hard cash combined, could turn worthless paper into glittering gold, cowtowns into cities, empty lots into bustling businesses, losers into winners, authors into millionaires. Confidence was a charm deployed by bankers and merchants, philosophers and politicians, clergymen and card like. Confidence was the soul of the trade of trade in the words of one leading financial publication. Without it, added herman melville, commerce between man and man as between country and country would, like a watch, run down and stop. In an age before the federal government began printing paper money, and age when people had to trust in privately issued banknotes, glorified ious confidence was the national currency. So that is what this guy possessed and confidence in his ability to wield it was what took him from being an upscale farm boy in new york, a failed lawyer, failed newspaper publisher, failed postmaster to the midwest which we then called the far west where he became a Mormon Prophet and a real threat to Brigham Young and the church and ran a couple utopian colonies which i will talk about, one of them in michigan. But i want to talk about your book. We took a word out of my title, lets take a word out of your title, coast. What is that all about . My book is called the inner coast. I thought about that. Sincere we are virtually speaking in chicago, i am over here on the other side of michigan but part of what i was thinking about, i grew up on the coast of california as the son of mid displaced midwesterners and spent my life by the great lakes and i wanted to make the case for the great lakes. Coasts have always been contact zones between here and elsewhere. At a modest tickly it coasts from latin, in middle english, could still offer you a coast of land meeting a rack of ribs. The fee coast was the rib cage of the land. In its primary sense, coast refused the place where land ends and the sea begins and all coasts are by definition outer and oceanic ones. The maritime geography of the midwest courier is a paradox. Michigan is midwestern. It is also coastal. Peninsular, in fact. Its shoreline, speculative lighthouses as new englanders longer than california, florida and all the other states besides alaska. Standing in the midwestern beach you can watch freighters slide across the horizon. In the article terms to coast is to travel by water by keeping the landing site but you can coast through the heart of north america circumnavigating all of the states east of the mississippi without laying eyes on specifics. These days the word coastal is sociological as it is geographic. Phrases like coastal living or coastal elites the word collapses, the west coast at east into a conjoined seaboard supposedly inhabited by decadent sophisticates as if brooklyn were next to berkeley or boston and commuting distance of seattle. Chicagoans or holiday goers are michigans gold coast might qualify as coastal in this sense but not representatives of gary or dearborn, home to the largest Muslim Community states, paddle down the rouge river from lake erie where i was born, a neighborhood on the northeast side of detroit has become popular with immigrants. I will stop there with a taste of that word coast. Lets go back to confidence because we touch on you brought in melville who wrote the confidence men and talked about this idea of confidence was required economically but was also a secret power for the charismatic, you talk later. Tell us the story of the origin of the word, you quote the newspaper story, introduce it into the lexicon. Fascinated by your book, that among all the materials you are drying into the store you are doing a certain, etymological excavation. You are reminding us whats part of the american vernacular originated in the antebellum period. Some of it is strange, you do the whole thing on the idea of silking. What is the origin of the term . One of the fun things i did with this book was finding words that were not early enough in the Oxford English dictionary is a lot of people know, there is a Gold Standard for etymology, it would be 1890, i dont know if they changed since they were back but confidence men, and what they struggle from is a massive technological revolution. The Communications Revolution the internet superhighway, people are really displaced so this confidence is an important thing. On new york newspaper, on the street, donovan dont you remember me and then be very embarrassed. Miles, i have got you. Im hurt by that. Give me a watch a show of confidence, he would do that as people give him their watches but this spread like wildfire and it is fun to watch it spread through the american mexican and so many walks of life and straying up atomized this. He was able in this period when truth was malleable, facts werent really facts a lot like our own time, they thrive in those times and he was able to invent his own truth, people wanted to be leave in. The historical figure, from the writers point of view, you know, you write about it bit, the index of your book and the acknowledgments that we is amazing. He is like a planetary object whose force of personality exerts Gravitational Force on the antebellum, the upper midwest, the whole nation, the book draws into it marvels and wonders and obscurities from that time. From under a in your index i call these items american revolution, hans christian, angels, what is wondrous about the book, historical figures you end up gathering into your narrative, pt barnum, charlotte bronte, john wilkes booth, henry clay, darwin, this guy shores who invented the keyboard. To gather that up, you talk about this now story a man of the crowd, there is a central figure about a man who had once arrested and absorbed my whole attention. Tell me how you think, i dont know if you want to explain that analogy, how does that work with the rest of the history . There are three good books about him and im not being the least dismissive. Or a michigan, and assassination of a michigan king, i saw him as a lightning rod for all the enthusiasms or social movements or apocalyptic fears. This embodiment of a crazy time. We do the same thing, the New York Times book review, and chris jennings, called myself wonderfully to aggressive which is the biggest consonant i ever had. Getting the big picture from the back, going back to you, the most wonderful nonfiction writers, doing what you praised me for, told this story 1 million times. The second essay on the intercoast, this is before i knew him. In harpers, 15 years ago, just at a time, started reading about this antique tool collector in michigan. I was interested in them but the way you brought American History and american commerce is incredible to me. Do you want to talk about that . That one for me is an important one because i had been writing nonfiction but i came in by way of fiction and poetry which is not that uncommon. Historically where the standards for writing programs but my first earliest essays to a congressional essays, what you had done in this book which i think of it as the art of finding, something the analogy i use comes from entomology, not etymology. You are going to follow it. It is fascinating and your mind starts generating questions. The king of confidence, for that essay, and uncle i have great affection for on the outskirts, had begun collecting by chance, in an armor, pick up two wrenches that were identical. Two specimens of the same plant, wrenches, he kind of maybe obsessive week, to the upper midwest factories, state sales are closed farms, all the artifacts of history, turn a barn on the outskirts of dexter that he has and a few of them but initially started into a kind of museum that is not open to the public. The arrays of artifacts, dinosaurs or bugs, 100 spigot handles that are identical and will make one array of them. A cabinet of wonders but not the national artifacts, that was hugely fascinating and accompanying him narrative into that narrative view create your own essay actually i think, a way in which you are doing something similar here, your charismatic figure you are following and allows you to follow your own curiosity and questions and make them speak to each other so that the inventor of the keyboard is adjacent to the guy who entered the tomato to the midwest as a medicinal plant. The accidental juxtaposition, does that make sense . We may be working from a similar message. Such admiration for you as a writer. I tell my students i dont make many predictions about the future of writing is one of them is i feel in my own work, interesting to hear from you i can talk about an example of this, in the digital age, more and more, is an act of storytelling. Increasingly i find myself, this book had a 250 page single spaced timeline, just list what is happening in the world but the juxtaposition, the narratives making machine. Another quick reading if you dont mind. Number 6. Did we lose bennett . Here it comes. So i thought, two short paragraphs, in between them a little explanation, really important to this and i want to read a little bit about islands. Islands, Edgar Allan Paul wrote, the stormy seas of the psyche, a place of perfect security with freedom from all restraint to be enjoyed, normal conduct, normal systems of logic dont apply, frequent locales for experimental communities including the original utopia which thomas moore said in his famous sixteenth century book. Many things we can say about the community. Really fascinating place and controversial but i wanted to talk about the draw, what was his draw . To understand what apocalyptic times these were. In 1848 when he was starting to start, push it, this was the year of apocalyptic fevers in the United States, i thought i would read about those. Straying spent the summer of 1848 pointing to what he described as ominous signs including a series of revolutions in europe, us war in mexico and rising tensions between north and south. For months he had been urging his fathers to prepare for the end. Let me warn you the time draws near, prophetic events are crowding close upon one another. His newspaper even reported local fishermen spotted a huge feature off the coast of deeper island. During the portentous years of 18471848. From the 21st century perspective it is hard to know what to make of such an outlandish claim, tended to equate this late michigan monster with the beast from the sea whose appearance hailed the apocalypse in the book of revelation. Knowing joseph smith claimed such things symbolized, quote, the degenerate kingdoms of the wicked world, strang may have hoped to underscore fever island as the new zion, the Promised Land where according to teaching latter day saints would help gather to usher in the Second Coming of christ and the advent of his 1000 years. The picture in front of you is not in illustration, was one of the many sea monsters legitimate people thought they saw in 18471848, a royal navy ship. Created a sense of really intense period we are talking about. And strang, it was not his only reason for going to that island. He started a criminal enterprise. He basically had a pirate phenomenon, since his people all over the lake to raid various towns through the midwest to still horses and other items. There has been a lot of controversy about this. Early writers so there is no proof that he pulled this off, these crimes, and that it was all antiwoman bias. There was plenty of antiwoman bias but he pulled it off and one of the things the king of confidence does is move that along a little bit. There is pretty solid undeniable realtime reporting of strangs crimes in this book. There is the chapter on the horse rustlers in ohio and if i cut it right, this is new research. That is all new. It is lots of fun, lots of great 19thcentury journalists and the editor of the ohio newspaper, a wonderful sarcastic writer but this is important because in real time theres a series of stories, one after the other. He steals horses, there is a posse sent after him, one of strangs top lieutenants, one of his enforcers. The paper reports on strang coming to town and predict he will get this guy out of jail, there is a trial, the guys found guilty and it is overturned, a technicality the sheriff didnt sell out. Papers in the area right about how that technicality seemed to be sensitive with corruption that someone got bribed and sure enough strang doesnt go to the state penitentiary and there is a jailbreak, he is gone and so theres a lot more of that. I was wondering, one of the things we are both interested in is the landscapes of the midwest. There is some stuff. The introduction which came out in early june. A couple paragraphs, you are right, all of these essays, a preoccupation with the idea of excavating and for me someone who is an adoptive midwesterner by distance, i grew up, my family was very nice downtick for the illinois prairie i grew up on the mythic midwest, lots of little house on the prairie, not just that but the whole project has been to do certain excavations and your book, this is the midwest like we never imagined it. One thing before i jump into my own stuff one of the things i love about the idea of islands, the tiny cosmos, feels like your book is doing the logic of the microcosm. We can look closely at Beaver Island and strang becomes the representative man of his period in so many ways, didnt mention the rest of his career as state legislator. Amateur meteorologist at the don of meteorology as a scientific discipline. A representative figure but the island becomes a concentrate of america in the middle of Lake Michigan. In my experience, a farm became down to us and our family, i have two paragraphs i will read. It was passed to generations in door county near the edge of Lake Michigan but in 1970 the farm was no longer operational. The family held into it as a heritage site to which the increasingly scattered tribe, sharing meals and boiled walleye and potato salad while communicating with an agrarian past is the just of which survived. The place was a museum of an anachronism. Exhibits included an empty red barn, an outhouse with a splintered door, a hand pump the drew water from a well, helixes of when amber, flypaper that spiraled from the farmhouse rafters and a few chickens including one whose beheading i was made to witnesses initiation into brutal invaluable farm life are to impart, had this, the chickens body ran a flapping lap around the chalking block, comical. At the edge of the farm was a shallow body of water and according to legend, one winter attempted to drive oxen across it and harvested timber which comes up in your book, heavy with harvested timber, the wagon had supposedly broken through dragging the logger and oxen with it, something i thought about while paddling around with my brother in a dented aluminum canoe. You could touch bottom with your paddle. The bottom is silky and soft and would sink into it as far as you could sponge it, never touching hard grounds. Who knew what was down there . I imagined if you fell overboard and tried to stand you would get sucked into the muck, disappearing. One of the prehistoric animals,